The easiest way to calculate the projected/frontal area of an STL.
Project description
Most lift and drag calculations require the use of a frontal/projected area. This is normally not that big of a deal, especially when dealing with nice clean CAD files. Unfortunately, in fast-paced design environments (motorsport especially), you'll often get a collection of STL geometry files instead. This is annoying for a number of reasons, but mainly because there are several methods for computing the frontal area of an STL and all of them involve a fairly tedious/lengthy process. pArea aims to solve this with a single command.
Installation
pip install parea
Usage
As a simple example, the cube STL located within the tests directory has a projected area of 4.0 along all three coordinate axes. To validate this, simply run the following (assuming you've downloaded cube.stl into your current working directory):
parea -stl cube.stl -x
Options
vectors: -x, -y, -z
planes: -yz/-zy, -xz/-zx, -xy/-yx
References
- Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications (3rd Edition) by Mike de Borg, Otfried Cheong, Mark van Kreveld, and Mark Overmars
- Computational Geometry in C (2nd Edition) by Joseph O'Rourke
- Finite Element Mesh Generation by Daniel S.H. Lo
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